Michael Fallon says the UK will take military action against cyber attackers

The chilling threat came as the Tory hawk revealed foreign enemy states are launching two “high level cyber attacks” on Britain every single day.

In a major speech be blasted “aggressor states like Russia, working overtime to disrupt and discolour our democracy” who launch around 60 attacks on Britain’s government IT, infrastructure and businesses every month.

Speaking to the respected Chatham House think-tank, the Defence Secretary said: “We now have the skills to expose cyber criminals, to hunt them down and to prosecute them.”

He said the “response in each case may need to be differentiated” but“ clearly has to be a point at which they cross a certain threshold, endangering the state itself, the daily existence of its people”.

He added: “that is why we have pressed for NATO to be clear that a cyber-attack can be just as threatening as any other kind of physical attack when you are getting into the territory of Article V.”

Sir Michael also claimed that “Parliament itself coming under a sustained and determined cyber-attack” should be a “wake up call to us all” about cyber defences and the importance of strong passwords.

He went on: “Last Friday we saw the UK hit by yet another cyber attack, this time directed against our parliamentary IT systems.

Michael Fallon claimed the attack on Parliament was 'a wake up to us all'

“Investigations so far have found that the hackers were attempting to carry out a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an attempt to identify weak passwords to gain access to users’ emails.”

He added that: “We all have a responsibility to look after ourselves online.

“A stronger password here, a Windows update there and we would have stood an even better chance of warding off the attacks,”

He said Government and the public both had a role to “play in contributing to a culture of resilience”

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And he said NATO was at the “front of the pack” in the “cyber space race”.

Sir Michael used a keynote security speech to proudly boasted that British experts “disabled some of the computer systems that supported infrastructure” to “weaken Daesh resistance” during the liberation of Mosul last year.

Speaking at the Chatham House think tank he said he had “no doubt” that the campaign to free Mosul in Iraq “would have been longer and more lives would have been lost” without British cyber attacks on ISIS last year.

He added that similar tactics were being deployed in in the fight for Raqqa in Syria.And he said Britain stands ready to pool our cyber warfare resources with NATO.

He said: “Having honed our own UK pioneering cyber techniques against Daesh in Iraq and Syria, I can confirm today that the UK is ready to become one of the first NATO members to publicly offer such support to NATO operations as and when required.”

Sir Michael also revealed that the UK is “building up a new 21st Century Cyber Corps, a band of expert volunteers, leaders in industry, who are going advise us on how to keep ahead in the cyber space race”.

He said these cyber reservists would “give up their time and expertise” to stress test British infrastructure and secure government IT.

And the Defence Secretary insisted the new HMS Queen Elizabeth was not vulnerable to cyber attack, despite using the Windows XP operating system that was hit in May’s NHS attack.